Mahalo

I’m leaving Mahalo because we’re leaving L.A…not the other way around. It was a tough choice, but I believe it was the right one.  I’ve built a team I can be proud of at Mahalo, and I have every confidence that they’ll do great things in the future. The truth of the matter is that I cannot manage this excellent team from a distance. A Lead Developer needs to be on site, dealing with the day-to-day running of things.  I cannot do that if I’m moving, pure and simple. There’s no drama, no feud, nothing like that…everything is ending on good terms.

I’m going to miss the whole company, no doubt about it. These are good, hardworking people. They deserve to succeed. I cannot wait to see what they are going to do next.

Leaving Los Angeles

I’ve written a little bit about why we’re leaving L.A. in a previous post, but there’s more to it that just economics and schools. Los Angeles might as well be a different planet when you’re coming from the midwest.  There are many who have moved here and loved it, and I can see why they would. The difficulty for use was that we did it with a family.  If Cathy and I had moved out here when we re newly married, I think things might have gone differently.

Some friends here told us what they’d like most: to own a small house with a good sized yard in a good school system. They followed that up with, “but this is L.A.”  As time went by, I heard this from other people — they all wanted what we took for granted, what we gave up to move here. And many of them had given up on ever achieving it, because “this is L.A.”

We’re moving back to our families, our oldest friends, to neighborhoods that we love, schools we know we can trust, and places that we’ve loved for years. We took so much for granted…that won’t be happening again.

People will poke fun about leaving the Big City, but that’s fine with me. Cleveland is home, and always will be.

New Eyes

Some folks have asked me if this move is bittersweet. No…not really. I achieved what I wanted to achieve at Mahalo, and I learned what I needed to learn from L.A.  I’m coming away better for it. If I never left Cleveland, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. It’s been costly, yes, but I feel I’ve gained far more than I’ve lost.

I’m looking forward to seeing home with new eyes. That alone will be amazing.

• Neil Diamond MusiCares Person of the Year
• Smokey Robinson Grammy Performance
• Stevie Wonder Grammy Performance
• M.I.A. Grammy Performance
• Kenny Chesney Grammy Performance
• Sugarland Grammy Performance
• Jamie Fox Ne-Yo Grammy Performance
• Carrie Underwood Grammy Performance
• Jay-Z Grammy Performance
• T.I. Grammy Performance
• Chris Brown Grammy Performance
• Adele Grammy Performance
• Kanye West Grammy Performance
• Jonas Brothers Grammy Performance
• Jennifer Hudson Grammy Performance
• Rihanna Grammy Performance
• Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Grammy Performance
• Kid Rock Grammy Performance
• U2 Grammy Performance
• Radiohead Grammy Performance
• Paul McCartney Grammy Performance
• Katy Perry Grammy Performance
• Coldplay Grammy Performance
• Lil Grammy Performance
• Justin Grammy Performance
• Best Rock Album 2009 Grammy Performance
• Best Alternative Music Album 2009 Grammys
• Best Country Album 2009 Grammys
• Best Pop Vocal Album 2009 Grammys
• Best Rap Album 2009 Grammys
• Grammy Awards
• Grammy Nominations
• 2009 Grammy Nominations
• Album of the Year 2009 Grammys
• Song of the Year 2009 Grammys
• Record of the Year 2009 Grammys
• Best New Artist 2009 Grammys
• 2009 Grammy Nomination Performances
• 2009 Grammy Performances
• Grammy Winners 2009
• 2009 Grammy Awards Photos
• Grammy 2009 Live Coverage

The plan for global domination marches on…

Additionally, Mahalo has great election result pages for every state.  Check out the full list:

• Alabama Election Results 
• Alabama Exit Polls
• Alaska Election Results 
• Alaska Exit Polls
• Arizona Election Results
• Arizona Exit Polls
• Arkansas Election Results
• Arkansas Exit Polls
• California Election Results
• California Exit Polls
• Colorado Election Results
• Colorado Exit Polls
• Connecticut Election Results 
• Connecticut Exit Polls
• Delaware Election Results 
• Delaware Exit Polls
• Florida Election Results 
• Florida Exit Polls 
• Georgia Election Results 
• Georgia Exit Polls
• Hawaii Election Results 
• Hawaii Exit Polls
• Idaho Election Results 
• Idaho Exit Polls
• Illinois Election Results
• Illinois Exit Polls
• Indiana Election Results 
• Indiana Exit Polls
• Iowa Election Results 
• Iowa Exit Polls
• Kansas Election Results 
• Kansas Exit Polls
• Kentucky Election Results 
• Kentucky Exit Polls
• Louisiana Election Results 
• Louisiana Exit Polls
• Maine Election Results
• Maine Exit Polls
• Maryland Election Results 
• Maryland Exit Polls
• Massachusetts Election Results 
• Massachusetts Exit Polls
• Michigan Election Results 
• Michigan Exit Polls
• Minnesota Election Results 
• Minnesota Exit Polls
• Mississippi Election Results 
• Mississippi Exit Polls
• Missouri Election Results 
• Missouri Exit Polls
• Montana Election Results 
• Montana Exit Polls
• Nebraska Election Results 
• Nebraska Exit Polls
• Nevada Election Results 
• Nevada Exit Polls
• New Hampshire Election Results
• New Hampshire Exit Polls
• New Jersey Election Results
• New Jersey Exit Polls
• New Mexico Election Results 
• New Mexico Exit Polls
• New York Election Results 
• New York Exit Polls 
• North Carolina Election Results 
• North Carolina Exit Polls 
• North Dakota Election Results 
• North Dakota Exit Polls
• Ohio Election Results 
• Ohio Exit Polls
• Oklahoma Election Results 
• Oklahoma Exit Polls
• Oregon Election Results 
• Oregon Exit Polls
• Pennsylvania Election Results 
• Pennsylvania Exit Polls
• Rhode Island Election Results
• Rhode Island Exit Polls
• South Carolina Election Results
• South Carolina Exit Polls
• South Dakota Election Results 
• South Dakota Exit Polls
• Tennessee Election Results
• Tennessee Exit Polls
• Texas Election Results 
• Texas Exit Polls
• Utah Election Results
• Utah Exit Polls
• Vermont Election Results 
• Vermont Exit Polls
• Virginia Election Results 
• Virginia Exit Polls
• Washington Election Results 
• Washington Exit Polls
• Washington DC Election Results
• Washington DC Exit Polls
• West Virginia Election Results 
• West Virginia Exit Polls
• Wisconsin Election Results 
• Wisconsin Exit Polls 
• Wyoming Election Results 
• Wyoming Exit Polls

We have a new box in the upper left of the homepage which automatically cycles through the most recent news in a number of categories. Beneath that, we have a second set of tabs which display feature items, like How-tos, videos, game news, and crazy stuff we find floating around the Internet. Beneath that is a list of categories and even more stories to browse.

The crowning jewel of the new home page is the liveblog. We have folks updating it around the clock, and you can jump in to discuss the topics of the day with our guides via ustream (which will be streaming live video during breaking news), or via a chat client embedded in the page.

Media Coverage:

• TechCrunch: Mahalo Sets Out To Liveblog The World
• CNET: Mahalo gets live news ticker
• Silicon Alley Insider: Jason Calacanis Turns Mahalo Into A News Operation, Invites You To Watch

From the docs:

Attached is a simple import, export, and backup utility. Mahalo.com has been using this in production for several months to back up our HBase clusters as well as to migrate data from production to development clusters, etc.

Simple MapReduce job for exporting data from an HBase table. The exported data is in a simple, flat format that can then be imported using another MapReduce job. This gives you both a backup capability, and a simple way to import and export data from tables.

The output of a backup job is a flat text file, or series of flat text files. Each row is represented by a single line, with each item tab delimited. Column names are plain text, while column values are base 64 encoded. This helps us deal with tabs and line breaks in the data. Generally you should not have to worry about this at all.

HBase Backup/Export/Import Tool

• Developers and Senior Developers
• Hadoop and Hbase Developer
• MySQL DBA
• Unix Systems Administrator
• Administrative Assistant

http://www.mahalo.com/Olympic_Medal_Count_2008

and

http://www.mahalo.com/Summer_Olympics_Opening_Ceremony_2008

Hadoop: When grownups do open source | The Register

Hadoop is a library for writing distributed data processing programs using the MapReduce framework. It’s got all the makings of a blogosphere hit: cluster computing, large datasets, parallelism, algorithms published by Google, and open source. Every four days or so, a nerd will discover Hadoop, write a “Basic MapReduce Tutorial with Hadoop” tutorial on his blog with some trivial examples, and feel satisfied with himself for educating the world about a yet-undiscovered gem. Comparatively, very few people actually use Hadoop in practice, and those who do don’t write about it. Why? Because they’re adults who don’t care about getting on the front page of Digg.

Read on. It’s great stuff, and you’ll definitely learn something useful if your site needs to…well…scale.

Very nice! Thanks to Ray Slakinski for sending this my way. It made my morning.